Maddie Morris is a 2019 BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award winner, a first-class honours graduate from Leeds Conservatoire whose music spans the political and personal. Widely praised for her approach to contemporary issues, Skin is her first full-length release in the wake of two EPs (no tracks repeated here) and should firmly consolidate her position as a rising star in the folk firmament.
Save for one number, Skin is a musically understated and restrained affair, opening with Marsha P Johnson, featuring Belinda O’Hooley on piano, Matt Downer’s double bass and Archie Churchill-Moss on diatonic accordion and audio samples from an interview (courtesy of Making Gay History – makinggayhistory.com). Both a celebration of Johnson, an African-American self-identified drag queen and one of the most well-known activists of the Stonewall uprising and how she’d like to be more like her as an activist (“Now I’m not Marsha P/And I swear if I could be,/I would wage a war for women that look like and unlike me/We’re taught to take it on the chin,/Like a manifesto of our skin/Whilst we’re screaming out for picket lines that didn’t want us in”). Written in response to realising that a feminist group she’d demonstrated with was now spreading anti-trans hate rhetoric in the name of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, it comments on how protest voices are silenced (“it violates the community guidelines on the websites/So they’re taking down our artwork and our language for good measure/And they say that it’s for our own good, let’s not instigate civil unrest/But the lack of a single statement becomes the Cabinet’s grandest gesture”). It also charts her own journey from early awakening (“I went to my first pride parade when I was just thirteen years old/My dad told strangers he was gay ‘cos I was scared they’d guess it was me/I met a lady in a purple tent, she gave my arms temporary tattoos/She said, ‘this is the life you’ve got, even if it’s not the one you’d choose’”) to “Ten years later I’m out protesting homophobes and growing flowers on small graves” hoping that “maybe everyone will cast their votes and get someone like us behind a screen/Maybe this time propaganda will subside, and we can remember what democracy means/And maybe our rainbow might mean liberation again, not just more random stuff they can sell”.
There’s only one wholly traditional number, and it also happens to be the liveliest. Again featuring Churchill-Moss and Downer alongside Bryony Griffith’s fiddle, George Sansome on bouzouki and Janice Burns on mandolin, Cedar Swamp was learnt from Jean Richie and, while not changing the words, sung here from a queer perspective with the narrator as a woman, the line “the older she gets, the prettier she gets” being the impetus to add it to her repertoire.
Again reflecting on her younger years and again with mandolin and strings arranged by Kate and Pete Ord, the soaringly sung Easily Bruised is about falling in love as a teenager and growing up queer (“I can’t pretend I don’t miss/Those 17-year-old-girls/Sweaty hands when we kissed/Head spinning, toes curled”) but mingled with now having mixed feelings about being seen with a girlfriend was a political statement (“As if choosing to exist we thought we’d changed the world”), rather than the relationship itself. Maddie shared how the title metaphorically touches on her “navigating the world as someone who is sensitive (in my case neurodivergent), and this is the idea of being ‘easily bruised’ as a sort of metaphor for being autistic/anxious and highly sensitive.”
Again with piano and double bass and Kath Ord on violin, homophobia is at the heart of deceptively pastoral sounding The IT Teacher, an understandably angry song about, at 16, traumatisingly being called an abomination for being gay by her, presumably feverishly religious, teacher in front of the class and the unsupportive response from her peers (“The girl with the eyelashes says, “You know, in Sir’s defence/He has his right to his opinion; you don’t need to take offense”/And my face was red, later my skin would bleed/He’s still a teacher now, I have him on my Facebook feed”). But she’s taken it as a call to bring about change (“it doesn’t have to be like this/We will insist on change/So there isn’t another generation/Who look back at their hometowns as if they were graves” and even though “it hurts to be optimistic, when you keep being proved wrong/When the voices of their bigotry is much louder than the bird song”, it still finds reasons to be cheerful:
I love the doctors and nurses that kept me alive,
On the day where their anger tried to take my life.
And I love my family, the one I chose,
And I love our community, but not just the rainbows.
I love the kids at the parades in their blue, whites and pinks,
Wearing flags like capes despite what their parents think.
I love the 60-year-old woman on the steering committee
Dedicating her life to the queers in our city.
I love the gay at the bar who compliments my shoes,
I love the person with the greyhound who does my tattoos,
I love the women at the bookshop who don’t know who I am,
I love the dads at the playground pushing double prams.
I love the way you don’t assume how I like to be referred,
I love the fact that you don’t question that the edges might be blurred,
I love the two trans women who started the fight,
Who are the reason I can stand here safely tonight.
I love the fact that I’m here, the fact that we survived,
The fact despite it all, we still find pride.
It ends pointedly with the line, “There will always be IT teachers, but there will also be liberation”.
Again looking to the traditional and with a queer spin on the names, initially sung unaccompanied before the arrival of guitar, mandolin, fiddle and bouzouki, The Wee Weaver tells of two women, one who works at the loom, who fall in love and get married, an unusually happy ending for a folk song. Another traditional, but with a revised final verse, arranged for piano, violin and mandolin, Must I Be Bound, a song recorded by virtually every folk icon from June Tabor and Shirley Collins to John Kirkpatrick, Angeline Morrison and Maddy Prior, deals with domestic violence and living in abuse, Morris’s amendment adding a stance of defiance (“though in past my body he did bind/I will not let him take my voice”).
A re-telling of the Greek myth from the perspective of the doomed figure on his waxen wings to a framework of piano, string and double bass, Icarus explores the difficulty and confusion of trying to live up to parental expectations, how their goals for their children can feel limiting and how many, not just the marginalised feel “ I could do everything right/But I will never be enough”, the final line summing up that sense of somehow it being your fault (“Maybe I could bear the shame of it/If it hadn’t happened in front of him/My father’s masterpiece/Falling deep in the sea/When I realise the failure/Isn’t the masterpiece, but me”).
The accordion returning to join the fiddle and bass, the intentionally uncomfortable Tonight’s Show uses metaphor (“They drilled holes into the palms of my hands/Threaded string through the fractured bones and/As they pushed and pulled I didn’t understand/Never learnt a limit to the worst I could withstand”) and the framing of a confrontational TV show (“They clap their hands and bang their glasses on the table/And they keep asking why we didn’t say no/They keep assuming that we knew that we were able”) to explore the experiences of being an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse and abuse imagery and how fear of stigma means many are unable to share their stories (“I guess I’m growing gardens of shame/Extradited in the parts that I was taught not to say/Suppose I’d learnt to bear it either way/Uprooting the sordid details, like some masochistic bouquet/Something to really stick your teeth in, this chapter of my mind”). The closing line, “I didn’t want to surrender/And I’m not sure yet if I can”, hits like a fist.
The last appearance by Churchill-Moss, Downer and Sansome, A Bonny Bunch Of Roses, collected by George Butterworth in Heslington, 1907. It was inspired by the Yorkshire tune and its account someone using the flowers as a way to share a love forlorn, the unrequited ardour recast here in Sapphic colours and couched in botanical imagery (“My love bloomed late like rosemary flowers, in winter planted like a seed/My invitation came too soon, for my love to bear dark leaves”) and, quite possibly the only song to talk about leaving Bedford. Maddie shares: “I wrote the song as a way to reclaim traditional tunes collected in Yorkshire, with queer stories inspired by the ‘West Yorkshire queer stories archive’, as there are few stories of queer relationships within the tradition.”
With Griffith on swaying fiddle, it ends on a wry, humorous note but with a nevertheless serious message for Political T Shirt, a ballad somewhere between Beans On Toast and Billy Bragg about the ways that schools put boundaries on students (“They told me not to wear such political t-shirts/Or to hold your hand in the corridor/And they acted as if one was an extension of the other”) and how the education system regards young people expressing or exploring gender identity as somehow just being intentionally difficult (“They told me that my hair was against regulation/I could sense their fear that I might look like a boy/It was as if rebellion was the centre of my existence/Never realised that I was just trying to find joy”). But, as with the album overall, it signs off on a note of hope as she declares “this is life I have chosen, this is love I was owed”.
Skin is described as a musical journey into identity, activism and hope; the songs will resonate with anyone who’s felt marginalised for being who they are or made to feel uncomfortable in their own skin…while quietly understated, Maddie’s songs are no less potent in their vital messages.
Bandcamp: https://maddiemorrismusic.bandcamp.com/album/skin